


Blueberry Muffins and C-4

by heliantheae



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: And Annoying Tony Stark, Cats, F/M, Humor, Kicking Hydra's Ass, Muffins, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Sharon Carter is a Millenial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 12:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15291957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliantheae/pseuds/heliantheae
Summary: “I’ll race you to that barn,” Sam offers.“Loser has to explain what anime is to Steve?” Sharon asks.“Deal,” Sam shouts over his shoulder, already sprinting away.Sharon doesn’t waste her breath swearing at him, but loses anyway.Or, SHIELD falls apart and Sharon somehow finds herself working for the Black Widow. It's not what she was expecting.





	Blueberry Muffins and C-4

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway, here's my contribution to pretending that 87% of canon never happened, and that Infinity War never came out.

“Why are cats so yucky? These are your sneezes all over this window,” the Black Widow says, pointing the incriminating smudges out to an interested calico cat.

The cat makes an attempt at biting the Widow’s index finger. Sharon almost sighs from where she’s wedged behind the couch. This is it, she thinks to herself. The last words I’ll ever hear will be the Black Widow baby-talking to a cat before she decapitates me with a bottle of Windex. This doesn’t happen though, and the Widow continues to lecture the cat while scrubbing its snot from the French doors she’s crouched next to.

Sharon takes a moment to wonder why she hasn’t been beaten to death with a roll of paper towels yet. The first and least likely option is that the Widow doesn’t know Sharon is here and hiding behind her couch. She’s the Black Widow though, which means she definitely knows. Maybe she doesn’t want to kill someone in front of the cat. From what Sharon has learned in the half hour she’s been snooping through the house, the cats are basically treated like children. There are three of them, the two not helping the Widow clean are glued to the picture window on the other side of the room, watching and occasionally chirping at a squirrel in the front yard. That doesn’t make sense either though. Didn’t cats like, sometimes eat people? The Widow probably wasn’t worried about traumatizing them. Sharon has worked with the Widow before and, while not an expert on the behavior of terrifying and violent ex-KGB assassins, has definitely seen her play this kind of game before.

She distinctly remembers an op in Belarus during which their cover was blown. The Widow had pretended not to notice the security team of the businessman they’d been sent to kill sneaking up on her, bought an ice cream cone, took out all ten men without even losing the top scoop on the cone, and then proceeded to eat it smugly while they waited for extraction. Probably the Widow was toying with her. As soon as she got bored she’d snap, and so would Sharon’s neck.

The Widow continues to talk to the cat, this time in Russian. Sharon doesn’t speak Russian, because it’s not the 1960s anymore and being able to speak Farsi or Mandarin, both of which she’s fluent in, is much more useful. The Black Widow is an annoying and deadly anachronism, and Sharon is going to be upset if this is the mission that kills her.

As it turns out, there’s an option that doesn’t end in Sharon’s untimely demise and subsequent use as cat food, which she hadn’t considered. “Sharon, honey,” says the Widow. “I was going to let you be sneaky and plant your bugs for Phil and then throw them out when you left, but it really can’t be comfortable back there. You can come out and have a cup of coffee if you want.”

“Christ,” says Sharon, and the little calico cat peers under the couch at her. 

The Widow frowns at her when she emerges. “I should vacuum under there more often,” she says, and pulls a dust bunny out of Sharon’s hair. 

“I’m sorry about this,” Sharon says awkwardly, once they’re seated and having coffee. “Director Coulson just wanted to be sure you were doing okay after the incident in DC.”

“It’s Director Coulson now, is it?” the Widow looks thoughtful. 

“He’s putting SHIELD back together,” Sharon confirms.

The Widow hands her a cup of coffee. “Some things should stay dead. He should know that better than anyone.” 

“Director Coulson is a good man,” Sharon says, and immediately wonders why she thought arguing with the Black Widow was a good idea when the other woman raises an eyebrow at her.

Even wearing sweatpants that proudly proclaimed them to be from Aeropostale down the leg, the Widow was terrifying. Didn’t Aeropostale go out of business? Sharon wonders, because they hadn’t been in style since she was in like, middle school.

“It was kind of him to think of my well-being,” the Widow allows. “However, he has my cell number. He could have called instead of sending you to bug the place.”

“He wasn’t sure how you’d react?” Sharon tries, and she feels she deserves the unimpressed look she gets because yeah, that was weak.

“I was still a Russian operative when the Soviet Union fell,” the Widow informs her. “This is hardly the most spectacular regime change I’ve lived through.”

That’s a very good point, so Sharon shrugs. There’s really no point lying to someone who will always be able to tell. “He wants to recruit you to help found the new SHIELD. In order to do that though he had to know you were trustworthy.”

“Ah,” says the Widow. “Is whether or not I kill you the test of my trustworthiness? Because I ought to mail Phil your head, just on principle if it is.”

“You could also not do that?” Sharon suggests. “And maybe just call Director Coulson.”

The Widow gets up and dumps the bugs Sharon had been trying to place into a blender. She turns it on, and says over the noise, “I’m not joining the new SHIELD. I want to be my own woman, for once.” 

“Do you even know how?” Sharon asks, and the Widow stops the blender halfway through her question so she finishes it unnaturally loudly.

“No,” says the Widow, voice flat. “My parents died in the Battle of Stalingrad when I was just a baby. That was in 1942. The government collected the orphans from the war, and trained us to serve our country as they saw fit. I did so until the Soviet Union fell in 1991. I was supposed to be sold to HYDRA then, but had been sent on a personal mission for one of my handlers. That’s when Barton found me. I’ve been with SHIELD since.”

Sharon blinks, stunned and momentarily distracted from the thought that the Widow was probably going to dismember her and mail pieces of her body to Director Coulson and other government officials. “That’s horrible.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” the Widow tells her. “I thought I was a ballerina for most of it.”

“You thought…?” Sharon trails off. “What?”

“Brainwashing,” says the Widow, as if she’s stupid. “Every enhanced operative was carefully managed to ensure their complete loyalty. They were hoping to avoid a Rogers situation.”

Steve Rogers, formerly known as Captain America and Sharon’s next door neighbor, currently known as the American government’s second or third biggest pain in the ass depending on your clearance level, was on a vigilante rampage at the moment. Sharon can kind of see why brainwashing had been the preferred option. 

“There was more than just you?” Sharon asks, because thinking about Rogers makes her head hurt and even if most of what she’s hearing is the better part of a century out of date she might learn something.

“The orphans from the war,” the Widow repeats, slowly for her benefit. “And some prisoners. Most died during the procedure, of course, and many more during training, but there are still three of us left. It’s all in the HYDRA files I dumped.”

She kind of wants to rub her temples, because being treated like a child by a Cold War relic that probably still does actual physical dead drops and doesn’t believe drones should be used when there’s an agent that could go in and shoot people instead is frustrating.

“So you’re not telling me anything useful,” Sharon surmises, and the Widow actually smiles when she refills her cup of coffee.

“Just saving you some reading,” the Widow agrees. 

“Right,” says Sharon. “I appreciate that,” even though she doesn’t and now she’s probably going to end up combing through the leaked files to confirm everything the Widow says because there’s only like, twelve SHIELD agents in existence right now and they’re all busy.

The Widow feeds her blueberry muffins, pours her two more cups of coffee, and only talks about her cats for the rest of the time Sharon is there. The calico is named Debra, the gray one is Larry, and the orange tabby is John. They’re all rescues, they all have terrible manners, and the Black Widow would probably topple governments to protect them. Having to remember this information to report later is infuriating. “Do you want your bug pieces?” the Widow asks as she’s preparing to leave.

Sharon shakes her head. “Throw them out. For what it’s worth, I understand why you don’t want to come back. I’ll do my best to convince Director Coulson to leave you alone.”

The Widow gives her a dozen muffins to take back to the office, and the small calico cat lets her pet it before she leaves. She’s really not so bad, even if Sharon once had to explain how to eat an avocado to her and she still refuses to adapt to HTML5.

\-----------

“Those are probably poisoned,” says Melinda May, eyeing the muffins Sharon had set on her desk.

“I had a few and haven’t died yet,” Sharon offers.

“Could be slow-acting,” May muses.

Sharon rolls her eyes. “If she wanted to kill me she would have done it while I was sitting in her kitchen.”

“It might not be you she wanted to kill,” Skye chimes in cheerfully, coming over to investigate. “Maybe she wants to take out the rest of SHIELD.”

The rest of SHIELD currently resides on the least structurally unsound floor of an abandoned office building on the outskirts of Washington DC. She, Skye, and May are the only ones present at the moment. Director Coulson is in a meeting with the CIA or NSA or some other acronym agency, the three remaining analysts were probably getting drunk in a bar instead of dealing with the massive amount of work sorting through every SHIELD file in existence looking for HYDRA influence was. Fitz and Simmons were on loan to Stark Industries, living it up in a building with air conditioning and breakroom snacks that weren’t probably poisoned. That was the extent of it. “She seemed kind of unhappy,” Sharon argues. “I think she’d want to kill us in person, not via muffin.”

“On a scale of missing donuts in the breakroom to finding out aliens were real, how unhappy?” May wants to know. 

Sharon shrugs. “She talked a lot about wanting to be her own woman. Didn’t seem real pleased Director Coulson was trying to restart SHIELD.”

“I don’t think SHIELD is going to restart,” Skye says. “Fitz and Simmons quit. They’re working for Stark Industries now. The analysts quit too. I think the CIA got them.”

“It’s just us now?” Sharon asks.

“No,” says Skye. “I’m also quitting. MIT offered to hire me to teach a class on hacking.”

Sharon looks at May. May says, “I’m retiring. I deserve this.”

“Ugh,” Sharon replies. “You know, I listened to the Black Widow talk about her cats for this agency? And she threatened to mail Director Coulson my head.”

“I’m thinking someplace tropical,” May continues, ignoring her. “I’m going to lay on a beach. I’m going to get rid of my rifle strap tan line. Catch up on reading. Maybe take a yoga class.”

“You’ll get bored,” Skye predicts. 

“Then I’ll topple a drug cartel or something,” May tells her. “There’s lots of vigilante activities I could get up to.” 

\-----------

As predicted, SHIELD dissolves. Coulson is shuffled off into some administration position, where a careful eye can be kept on him. Sharon is unemployed for roughly fifteen minutes before the Department of Defense assigns her to babysit the Black Widow. “Just, I don’t know,” says a harried man with the look of mid-level management. “Report it if she starts talking about overthrowing the government.”

“The American government or any government in general?” Sharon asks. 

The man briefly looks like he wants to cry. “Do you think she might overthrow other governments? Christ, this is a disaster. We can’t kill her. She has an action figure.”

“No, no,” says Sharon. “I just wanted to clarify.”

“Thank God,” the man says. “Any government. Geopolitics are a nightmare right now.”

\----------

“Anyway,” Sharon says, once again sitting at the Black Widow’s kitchen counter and eating muffins, “That’s why I’m here.”

The Widow blinks at her. “I’m not going to overthrow the government.”

“Great,” Sharon tells her. “I’ll put that in my next report.”

“Are you required to report anything else I do? People I contact?” the Widow wants to know.

“I mean, technically,” Sharon says.

“Call your boss. Tell him you can’t find me. Quit. I’ll hire you instead,” the Widow says. “I’ll match your current salary.”

“What would my job description be?” Sharon asks, pulling out her phone. 

The Widow shrugs. “I don’t care. Assistant or something? I can’t have you wandering around reporting on my activities and I’d rather not kill you.”

“Huh,” says Sharon, and makes the call. 

Afterwards, Sharon says, “You could just pay me in muffins, honestly. You should open a bakery instead of killing people.”

The Widow ignores her in favor of ushering five people out of a back room. “Everyone,” she says, “This is Sharon. My new assistant. Sharon, this is everyone.”

“Oh my God,” says Sharon.

“It’s good to see you again,” Steve Rogers tells her, and shakes her hand. 

The other four people are Clint Barton, Sam Wilson, the Winter Soldier, and a blonde woman that introduces herself as Yelena Belova. “I need to sit down,” says Sharon. “This is so classified. You know in movies when someone finds out a secret and they’re like, wow, I really shouldn’t know this? And then they get shot for knowing it? That’s how I feel.”

“It gets easier,” Sam tells her. “I’m glad you’re joining the team. It’ll be nice to have another normal human around.” 

“I’m glad you’re here too,” the Winter Soldier says sincerely. “Natasha makes us take turns doing chores. I’ll have to feed the chickens less this way.”

“Bucky doesn’t like the chickens,” Steve explains. 

Barton fist bumps her and wanders out of the room. Yelena, on the other hand, comes right up to her, cups her face in her palms, and mimes snapping Sharon’s neck. “That will be you if you ever use all the hot water,” the woman informs her. “Yes?”

“Yes,” Sharon confirms. “Wait, am I living here?”

“If you want to,” says the Widow. “It would be easier if you did, and there’s room. Yelena won’t actually kill you for using the hot water. She’s just dramatic.”

Yelena makes pointed eye contact with Sharon while dragging her finger across her throat when the Widow turns away. 

Sharon turns to Sam. “This is a hallucination, right? I’ve been drugged and captured or something.”

“Nope,” Sam says cheerfully. “Welcome to Wonderland. We’re all mad here.”

“That sounds like something a hallucination would say,” Sharon informs him, but accepts a refill of her coffee cup.

\----------

Being the Black Widow’s assistant turns out to be kind of boring, actually. The Black Widow, or Natasha, Sharon guesses, since they’re living together now and all, bakes a lot. She reads. She plays with the cats and shouts at Barton for leaving his socks everywhere, because damn it, he’s married, hasn’t Laura trained him out of this yet? Sharon goes grocery shopping as often as she goes to definitely illegal arms deals, watches a lot of Netflix with a fascinated Yelena, and goes running with Sam. 

They are in the middle of nowhere at the moment, jogging down a dirt road. “I’ll race you to that barn,” Sam offers. 

“Loser has to explain what anime is to Steve?” Sharon asks.

“Deal,” Sam shouts over his shoulder, already sprinting away.

Sharon doesn’t waste her breath swearing at him, but loses anyway. 

They jog home in companionable silence, only to discover that the kitchen has turned into a war room while they were gone. “What?” Sam asks Barnes, who is stacking packages of C-4 on the counter.

“What?” Sharon echoes, eyeing the collection of assault rifles that had appeared out of nowhere.

“We’re taking out HYDRA’s main base of operations,” Natasha says breezily, like this is no big deal and they’ve all been in on the plan.

“They’ve gotten quite comfortable since the mess with the Accords,” Yelena adds, strapping so many knives to her person that Sharon fully expects her to start resembling a giant steel hedgehog.

“I wanted to tell you,” Steve says earnestly. 

Barnes snorts. “You did not. You felt guilty about planning this the entire time, but not once did you say you wanted to tell them.”

“Guilty?” Sam asks.

Steve sighs. “You and Sharon are always talking about mental health and mindfulness and that yoga stuff. You think we should be taking time for ourselves,” he gives them his best kicked puppy look. “I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Sam.

Sharon pinches the bridge of her nose. “Why was leaving us out of planning a full scale assault on a HYDRA base your solution to that? After we ignored the fact that you sneak out and blow up more minor terrorists on a weekly basis?”

Steve looks even more guilty. “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

“We would have helped, man,” says Sam. “I just figured you needed to blow off some steam.”

“Would you look at the time,” Natasha says, not sounding regretful about interrupting in the least. “And there’s Clint with the Quinjet.”

Sharon looks out the window to find that yes, Barton was landing a jet in the front yard. 

“I’m going to kick your ass,” Sam tells Steve, but he’s already heading to his room to change into combat gear. 

Sharon groans, and goes to do the same. 

\----------

Several hours later, Sharon finds herself out of bullets and in the basement of the HYDRA facility. She’s with Yelena, who has a terrified scientist, the director of the lab, zip-tied to a chair. “This looks important,” Yelena says, holding up a rack of test tubes. “It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”

The scientist whimpers. “What were you doing here?” Sharon asks him.

“What are they always doing?” Barnes asks from behind her. 

She very determinedly does not jump, though the scientist does. “Trying to replicate the serum,” Sharon sighs, even though she’s almost certain it was a rhetorical question.

Yelena hums dispassionately. “See if there’s bleach under that sink, won’t you, Yasha?” 

“Don’t, please,” the scientist says. “We’re so close.”

“Would you look at that,” Barnes says. “There is.”

“Would recreating the serum really be so bad?” the scientist babbles. “We could help a lot of people.”

Yelena cocks her head. “Really now.”

“Like Captain America,” the scientist says. “The serum turned him into the ideal version of himself. A perfect specimen, without flaws.”

The rest of their team is filtering into the lab. “Everything is secured,” says Steve. “Clint and Sam are dealing with the prisoners.”

Sharon takes this to mean that they’re lining them up to be loaded into prison transport vans, not shooting them, since it’s Clint and Sam.

“He’s got a few flaws,” Barnes says to the scientist. “About as obedient as a cat, for one. But HYDRA fixed that in me, didn’t they? Supersoldier 2.0, now willing to mindlessly follow orders.”

Natasha and Yelena are circling the man like sharks that sense blood. “You don’t want to help people, you want to control them,” Yelena says. “Supersoldiers are just the weapons you would use to do that.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Natasha smiles grimly, “But I’m tired of being treated like a gun. Would you like to do the honors, James?”

Barnes pauses. “To be clear, you mean destroying the samples and not shooting this asshole.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Buck.”

Barnes snorts and dumps the bleach on the serum samples, irrevocably contaminating them. The scientist snarls, but doesn’t get any further than that before Natasha knocks him out. “Whoops,” she says. “My hand slipped.”

\----------

Outside of the base, Sharon watches Steve punch a number into his phone. “Hey, Tony,” he says when the call goes through. “You know how you’re still playing nice with the government?”

He pulls the phone away from his ear for a solid two minutes while Stark swears at him. The eyebrows of everyone in the vicinity with enhanced hearing rise higher, and then higher still.

“Right,” Steve says when he’s done. “I’ve got a present for you. Do you have a pen on you? I’ll give you the coordinates.”

\----------

Sharon wakes up one morning, months later, to the sound of a breaking dishes. She disentangles herself from Sam, who mutters, “Don’t wake me up if it’s not a national emergency,” before stealing all of the blankets and going back to sleep.

She stumbles into the kitchen, squinting, and then pinches her arm to makes sure she’s not dreaming. Steve is sitting dejectedly on the floor, surrounded by coffee and broken cups. Everyone else in the room is standing perfectly still, balancing trays packed with full coffee cups on their heads, arms, and in Barton’s case, one of his feet. 

“Hey, Sharon,” Laura calls from the living room. “The kids and I are watching cartoons if you want to join us.”

“Can I have one of your coffees?” Sharon asks Yelena.

Yelena glowers at her. “If you unbalance one of my trays I’ll gut you with a coffee stirrer.”

“I could also get my own,” Sharon says, and does just that before going to join Laura.

“Good morning,” the other woman says. “Sorry if the kids and I woke you up when we got here.”

“Only if by kids you mean Steve and whatever’s going on in the kitchen,” Sharon tells her.

“Ah,” says Laura. “That was a little odd.”

Laura has been married to Clint Barton for a decade and works as an ER nurse besides. Her nerves are basically bomb proof, especially after three children. It would take a lot more than whatever shenanigans the Super Quartet and Clint had gotten up to now to weird her out. “Odd?” Sharon prompts.

“Apparently they’re going to open a sit down bakery coffee shop thing. They’re competing to see who gets to wait tables. Natasha has already been declared the baker, of course, but she still wanted to try,” Laura explains.

“You know,” Sharon says, “I waited tables in college and then I switched to literally killing people for the government so I didn’t have to do that ever again.”

“Amen to that,” Laura says, and they turn their attention back to whatever animated atrocity replaced Spongebob on Nickelodeon.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
